There’s something of a lull between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Because we are an agricultural enterprise, we fit right into the ancient seasonal pattern of harvest and celebration. It’s our time to rest, regain our energy, get caught up and then gear up for the new season. Soon we’ll be pruning and starting the whole cycle all over again for the 2008 vintage. I can’t believe it.

As I mentioned in a previous posting, our core vineyard people are not seasonal workers. They are full-time, benefited employees. This is the time of year when they use vacation time to take their families back home for the holidays.

These employees are professionals, and the quality of their work depends on proper execution, as with any craft. Most members of our … More…

One of my goals as a winemaker after each crush is to get the winery buttoned up before Thanksgiving. The wines should be fully topped in barrel and prepped to go through malolactic fermentation (secondary bacterial fermentation converting malic acid, found in apples, to the softer lactic acid, found in milk). The winery should be in a winter “safety zone” so that I’m comfortable leaving for vacation.

During harvest, everything stacks up. Business and personal bills go unpaid and there are piles of unopened mail. But by Thanksgiving, there is time to re-cap the vintage and evaluate aspects of it while they are still fresh in my mind. I think about changes we can make, equipment we should purchase.

I try not to taste the wine until it completes malolactic. … More…

We had a beautiful Thanksgiving weekend, and a lot to give thanks for. We’ve had only a few days of showers post-harvest, just enough to turn the hills and cover crops in the vineyards a vibrant green in contrast to the few remaining yellow, brown and rust-colored leaves on the vines.

We followed a year of low rainfall with another relatively dry year. Lucky for us, we had neither a hot summer nor a heavy crop in 2007. Next spring, if the soil profile is not refilled naturally, we will irrigate. That’s where our neutron probes are very helpful, helping us to determine the extent of soil moisture and how much we need to add when the ground isn’t saturated.

Still, despite the many advantages of drip irrigation (low, precise and efficient … More…